Programming Haiku

by Nox

on 10.13.13

In my relentless attempt to independently develop software that people will actually pay for, I find myself deeply invested in a unique experience that often defies words.

How can one begin to express the way it feels to labor over systems that we build but do not understand? So much of the work of a programmer is unobservable — black triangles. We are painters that paint on the back of the canvas while looking at the front. We are the backbone of a post-industrial society, and yet we cannot possibly know what we are doing. They call us engineers, but if bridges were built like programs are, we would all be dead.

The following haiku encapsulate my experiences as a neurotic programmer, aware of all of this, struggling to find the truth somewhere between paradigms, and always coming up empty-handed.

Bad Tools

Fuck, OpenGL
Draw me some triangles please
Debug it all day

Never as Bad as it Seems

Where did I go wrong?
The physics do not update.
Print them. Oh, I see.

Flow-based Weenie

reactive functions
in dataflow callback hell
choking on shared state

My Routine

make make make make make
print print print print print print print
make make make make make